Tech Was Supposed to Be Society’s Great Equalizer. What Happened?

In the latest episode of the podcast Crazy/Genius, we ask why the dream of the digital revolution has proven so disappointing for some of its early advocates. One of those dreamers was Meredith Broussard, a computer scientist and a data journalist, who entered Harvard University in 1991, just months after Tim Berners-Lee launched the first website. “The early Internet was deeply groovy,” Broussard said, a place where idealistic young men and women thought they could redesign the rules of society. But Broussard soon switched her major when she found the computer science track at Harvard to be marred by sexism. Today, she says, many of the tech industry’s failures stem from a force she calls “technochauvinism.” This is not only a critique of the software industry’s infamous gender inequality, which makes it difficult for women’s perspective to be considered in designing tech. It is also chauvinism in the original sense of the word: a presumption that the most advanced technological solution is inherently the best one. The only way to make technology that helps a broad array of people is to consult a broad array of people to make that technology. But the computer industry has a multi-decade history of gender discrimination.